Tournament of Books Final Round: THE GOOD LORD BIRD by James McBride vs. LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson

Unsurprisingly, THE GOOD LORD BIRD takes home the Rooster. I was a little disappointed in the Tournament this year—not just because I think the least offensive, most broadly appealing book won, but also because I didn’t feel that I read many new ways of looking at the books that were reviewed. There are kind of two camps of book reviews, one that presupposes you’ve read the book and one that doesn’t. I usually prefer the former; I turn to reviews when I’ve just read a book, to see if there’s a new interpretation of the text that I haven’t considered. I rarely look to reviews for recommendations; a recommendation can be a list or a couple sentences and suffice for me to pick up the book.

Both THE GOOD LORD BIRD and LIFE AFTER LIFE are historical novels; a friend of mine doesn’t like reading historical fiction because she “doesn’t know if what [she’s] learning is true.” I’m interested in that point of view; it’s true of pretty much anything we read from far enough in the past (did George Washington really chop down that cherry tree? I argue there is literally no way to be sure) but it also points out the limits of historical fiction. At some point, if you’re curious enough about the events depicted, you’ll head to nonfictional source material to learn more. This is more important in THE GOOD LORD BIRD than LIFE AFTER LIFE, particularly if you’re not familiar with the characters McBride lampoons. (I am assuming that almost any reader knows that someone like Ursula didn’t shoot Hitler in a tavern, and that Eva Braun didn’t have many female friends). In that sense, I suppose THE GOOD LORD BIRD is more successful; it’s more likely to push readers to learn more, if only because the characterizations of historical figures are so funny and odd. I am interested in whether John Brown’s sons were basically as depicted, and whether any of the reinforcements on the train who were scared off by the lack of a password realized later what they had missed, and how they felt about missing it.

I’m strangely not curious at all to read anything else by McBride, though, and that’s why I still think that THE SON won this tournament. I can’t wait to get my hands on AMERICAN RUST, and I want to re-read THE SON very soon.

Read the final ToB judgments here.

Tournament of Books Round Sixteen: LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson vs. THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES by Hanya Yanagihara

Well, now I don’t care about the ToB at all. I have no dog in this fight. I guess I hope THE GOOD LORD BIRD wins, but this year’s is pretty much over for me already.

But let’s go back to a few minutes before I read the end of the review. Interestingly (?), both of these novels deal with immortality, whether author-derived or turtle-conferred. LIFE AFTER LIFE concerns Ursula, a woman growing up over the course of the twentieth century, mostly in England, who has the ability—to use a video game term—respawn after every type of death. Whether she is murdered or drowns or kills herself, she is reborn, and has many of the same experiences but avoids that particular death. She doesn’t know this about herself (and I think the novel would have been greatly more interesting had she somehow figured this out, or known it all along; what wouldn’t you do if you knew you couldn’t die?) but she has vague premonitions of having had past lives, and these premonitions push her toward an ineffective psychoanalyst. She is surrounded by a host of interesting and flawed characters, but is not herself noticeably flawed; in my previous review I held that she is only supposed to be a stand-in for the reader, and I support that interpretation still. Although the ToB reviewer thinks he will revisit this novel, I doubt that I will; like a video game, once you’ve played it all the way through in every permutation of Ursula, there’s nothing new to discover. There is nothing in Ursula to agree or disagree with, to find myself in apposition or opposition to. Ursula experiences a great many historical events, but these too hold little interest in revisiting; we know what happened and in many cases it seems inexorable. What could Ursula have done (save for the opening scene of her shooting Hitler) to change the course of WWII? Ursula never made it that far up the power ladder. At best she was Eva Braun’s best friend, and even killing Eva Braun seems unlikely to have convinced Hitler of the error of his ways. Could Ursula have done more? Sure, but we can’t fault her for what she did.

THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES, on the other hand, has at its center Abraham Norton Perina, a deeply flawed man to whom we can certainly see ourselves in opposition; there are many things Norton could have done differently, or better, from his due diligence on med school and his subsequent employment to his treatment of the native people of the island of Ivu’ivu, to his behavior as a father and as a person. Norton’s flaws are myriad, and to me some of the most interesting are his treatment of his brother, and his feelings about romantic relationships. Norton wants us to believe, at the end of the novel, that he was never loved, and could never find the type of love he truly desired. (Ursula, I want to note, has lives in which she is both loved and unloved, but the relationship that seems to mean the most to her is her relationship with her distant father. Despite the professed importance of this relationship, we don’t see many scenes of Ursula and her father sharing “quality time.”) Is Norton being truthful in these disclosures? Perhaps Norton had opportunities for love and discarded them, or deterred them with his own disdain and general personal awfulness? Why is he so upset with his brother’s homosexuality, and his brother’s long-term relationship? What does Norton find so enviable and admirable about young Ivu’ivuans that he couldn’t have found with young men from his hometown, or from his university or med school? Many readers of this novel seem incredibly willing to throw it aside, having finished it and having made their judgments of the moral unacceptability of Norton. I guess I’m interested in explaining the monster, or at least in exploring what makes him so monstrous. A lot was made of the importance of an absent or disengaged mother in WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN. A similar thesis is hesitantly proposed for Norton; his mother is sometimes catatonic and strangely unconcerned with him or his brother, and she dies when he is still rather young. Freudianly, Norton hates his father and ceases to think of him much after college. Norton finds him not sufficiently driven by success, although Norton doesn’t quite undertake his anthropology assignment as an avenue to success; Norton is floundering as he finishes up med school and might otherwise have had to return home to take up the family business. But I would still read that novel (Norton in middle America, trying to hide his awfulness behind the business of being a gentleman farmer) because Norton’s flaws and his cravenness and his lack of likability make him interesting to me. Ursula is too smooth a surface; the conceit of LIFE AFTER LIFE is interesting, but I wish it had been applied to a more meaty character.

My winner: THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES

ToB’s winner: LIFE AFTER LIFE

Read the terrible official judgment here. 

Tournament of Books Round Fifteen: THE GOLDFINCH by Donna Tartt vs. THE GOOD LORD BIRD by James McBride

Zombie Round! I find that my judgment in this round, between two books I enjoyed but didn’t love, is colored by my anticipation of, and excitement for, THE GOLDFINCH—I expected more from it, and it fell short of my hopes. I hadn’t heard anything about THE GOOD LORD BIRD, on the other hand—when I first saw it I thought it was going to be about the hunt for this thought-to-be-extinct woodpecker—and so when it turned out to be funny, and educational for someone who knew next to nothing about John Brown and Harper’s Ferry, I was surprised and pleased. For that matter, the sections that those who found THE GOLDFINCH charming cite (the Las Vegas interlude, and those scenes with Boris) I didn’t find particularly amusing. I loved Popchik, and I was glad that Theo got away from New York for a while, but I certainly wouldn’t have spent time with Boris on my own. He seemed like far more of a caricature than the similarly expedient Hobie. I liked Hobie, and I would read a short story about his life, but for Theo to remain loyal to Boris while screwing Hobie over with unnecessary deceit was too painful and unmotivated for me. I can’t see why Theo would have continued to create forgeries after the initial thrill of succeeding with one, and I think it happened simply because Tartt wanted to show that Theo continued to give in to his worst impulses like his father before him, without being overly tedious with the descriptions of drugs and drugged stupor and a few pills, and some drugs hidden under the bed.

I understood Onion better, even though his lived experiences are much farther removed from mine than Theo’s life of privilege and self-doubt. Onion’s motivations were clear to me: self-preservation is something we all have in common as a species, and wanting to avoid violence, as a theme I identified in the first review round, is very relatable. Onion didn’t have much regret for his father’s death, which I found strange, but he also got swept up into half-captivity half-adventure immediately afterward, and was understandably preoccupied with learning how to please his new master (and learning that he no longer had a master, no matter how important it was to stay with John Brown’s army.)

As much as I hate to level this judgment against any novel, I think THE GOLDFINCH was too long. THE GOOD LORD BIRD had the benefit of being constrained by the timelines of an actual event, John Brown’s life, but at least it had the good sense to stay within those constraints, keep the action moving, and introduce us to a broad enough range of characters that if we grew tired of the moralizing orator we could stay interested in the double-crossing prostitute. THE GOLDFINCH kept bringing me back to the same characters, whether likeable or not, and it ended up backfiring; even if I had had enough of the Barbours, they kept coming back, and even if I thought Boris was destined for an early grave, he escaped scrape after scrape. But not even by becoming a zombie can these characters survive this round…

My winner and ToB’s: THE GOOD LORD BIRD

Read the official Tournament judgment here. 

Tournament of Books Round Fourteen: THE SON by Philipp Meyer vs. THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES by Hanya Yanagihara

Noooooooooooooo.

This round pitted two books I loved against one another, so I really couldn’t have been happy (and I would have either of these trade spots with THE GOOD LORD BIRD in a heartbeat). It confuses me that there are people who don’t like either of these books—I have never felt that I need to love a main character, or approve of him; I probably need to empathize with him, but he doesn’t have to be a good person, and I feel I was let into the hearts and minds of both of the main characters of these novels.

Why might one choose THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES over THE SON? I still remember the scenery and the islands of Ivu’ivu. I would happily go there for vacation, and its demise through colonization and predation hurt me, as though I were losing a paradise I would otherwise have had access to. The novel had a deeper understanding of, and relationship with, animals than THE SON did, despite THE SON’s explorations of hunting, of pets, of the love of horses and the use of horses, and of the Native American practices of making bowstrings and blankets from animals. The latter part of THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES became a strange Phillip Roth pastiche, with a moneyed non-traditional suburban family exploring every conformation of dysfunction. Is there ever a situation in which a single father—and one who has a career outside of the home that he is very much dedicated to—successfully raises forty adopted children in rapid succession? Is this ever not an unregulated and unsupervised orphanage? What are we to make of the adult children who come home from college to wash the dishes and thank Norton for raising them? Was that even true? We may believe in our hearts that love is more important than money, and that a teenager who can’t go to college because he can’t afford it but who has his parents’ undying love and support will go farther than one given a trust fund and completely ignored growing up. But we also have to imagine, reading this narrative, that the unimaginable gap between growing up on a tiny island—I can’t even call it rural because there’s nothing like a city near Ivu’ivu to position itself against—and growing up in a rich American suburb is only bridgeable with a great deal of privilege, and private tutors, and strongly held expectations. I would read the memoir of one of Norton’s adopted daughters with great interest.

Of course, I would also gladly read the memoir of one of Eli’s Comanche brothers, even for the scenes in which the Comanches are decimated by a disease that Eli was vaccinated against—in his previous life, the life that he has entirely rejected, his mother’s care for him that early in his life protected him in this unimaginable new life he has entirely embraced. I still don’t understand why Eli’s mother opened the door to the Comanches, as she must have known what would happen, but that scene made me feel that she was still looking out for her son, that despite her own life, and that of her daughter’s, and that of her more sensitive son, the entire McCullough trajectory had as its purpose, its fate, bringing Eli McCullough into the world and helping him tear his way through it. And the glory of this novel is that it made me believe he was worth it.

My winner: THE SON

ToB’s winner: THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES

Read the official Tournament judgment here.

Tournament of Books Round Thirteen: A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING by Ruth Ozeki vs. THE GOOD LORD BIRD by James McBride

In today’s matchup we have the cross-dressing ex-slave, Onion/Henry, who is taken along on John Brown’s road to occupying Harper’s Ferry and taking a stand against slavery, versus the bullied Japanese high-school girl, Naoko, who goes to live at her great-grandmother’s Zen Buddhist temple after her father attempts suicide. There are a number of sections of each that require the reader to suspend disbelief, and the commentary of this round touches on one of them: how does Onion maintain the illusion that he is a woman for so long, in front of so many people, in a brothel, and as the second woman in a household full of men? I also want to know how Naoko’s mother fails to realize that her only daughter has dropped out of school and become a prostitute at a maid-themed café. And why Nao’s own tsunami-inflicted death ends up being less affecting than the death of one of John Brown’s mentally disadvantaged sons. But let’s start with what we do know.

John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry was well-intentioned but poorly planned, motivated more by theological righteousness than expedience, political concern, or well-connected scheming. John Brown sabotages his own plan by moving the date of his attack around without communicating with his reinforcements, choosing a location that is very well-protected and in the midst of unfriendly territory, and believing that no matter what he does, he can’t fail, because the Lord is on his side. He doesn’t make a plan B. He barely has a plan for retreat, and comes to realize at the end that his beliefs will even carry him through imprisonment and death, because he sees himself as something of a Messiah figure. I read a New Yorker article recently about the Branch Davidians, which reminded me quite a bit of John Brown. David Koresh wasn’t fighting for human rights, but he also believed that as long as he could communicate his religious message, his subsequent capture and imprisonment would be tolerable. Does John Brown’s motivation for his failed takeover of Harper’s Ferry justify his actions? Certainly if someone tried something similar now, they would be considered a terrorist—was John Brown a terrorist? Does knowing that his heart was in the right place and that history bore out his wishes change how his siege of the armory must have felt to the people who lived and worked there? Or to the slaves who saw what he was doing and knew it would fail? To the free blacks who had to consider whether to help him in principle and potentially die or lose their freedom, or leave him to his own devices and feel complicit with the forces that moved against him? I think this is both one of the simplest questions THE GOOD LORD BIRD raises, and also one of the most interesting. Onion doesn’t join Brown’s stand out of principle, but because he realizes he has failed to uphold a promise to Brown, and doesn’t want to betray his friend. Although Onion is basically opposed to slavery, he never believes that Brown’s plan will work. He comes to Brown’s aid because Brown was a second father figure to him, and because he feels he owes Brown his loyalty, which ends up being a stronger conviction than the inherent wrongness of slavery.

In Naoko’s story, the doomed fighter is her great-uncle, a conscripted kamikaze pilot in World War Two. Although the pilot generally appreciates the life he has had in Japan, and has affection for his countrymen, he understands that the war is wrong, that the methods by which it is fought are unjust, and that the enemy is also a scared young man like him, who shouldn’t be killed for wanting to protect his country. His experiences provoke Nao first to pride, when she thinks he carried out his military mission and died a martyr, then to regret for her former feelings when she learns that he crashed his plane into the ocean, leaving his mission unfulfilled but his morality uncompromised. Her duality of feeling brings up an interesting tension that we see today, as our country embroils itself in conflict after conflict that have little bearing on the United States’ direct survival, but a large bearing on the survival of individual Americans who enlist. We want very much to be proud of servicemen and –women, while at the same time want to condemn these wars, and their collateral damage and torture and disruption of provincial Middle Eastern lives. Yet in the specifics, this brings the average person into a direct contradiction; success may involve ordering a strike against a group of militants, and that same strike may kill the militants as well as some innocent goat-tending bystanders. Were the pilot who was ordered to perform that strike instead to crash his plane into the Hindu Kush, rather than kill a fellow man who may not directly wish him ill, I doubt we would feel the way that Naoko does. But Naoko is more certain of herself and of her feelings than Onion, and does less to brook discussion; though both are reporting on events for posterity in the form of a journal or private papers, Onion has a deeper conversation with himself than Naoko does, and pushes himself farther to find the truth.

My round winner and ToB’s: THE GOOD LORD BIRD

Read the official Tournament review here. 

Tournament of Books Round Twelve: THE GOLDFINCH by Donna Tartt vs. THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES by Hanya Yanagihara

You already know where this review is going. The difficult one is going to be next week, when THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES goes up against THE SON. Oh, my heart. But, we still have a bit to talk about with respect the THE GOLDFINCH, and the ToB commentariat...

The missing plot point in THE GOLDFINCH may well have been that the Russian gangsters who steal the goldfinch painting towards the end of the novel are part of a terrorist organization that also orchestrated the bombing of the Met that killed Theo's mom. This is the conspiracy theory I choose to believe; it explains why Boris came into the story in the first place, aside from being an entertaining set piece, and it explains why we are never told more about the bombing (so as not to ruin the surprise of the latter third of the book). Maybe Hobie is in on it too. Maybe Mr. and Mrs. Barbour have inadvertently funded terrorism through their hedge funds. Any of these editions would make THE GOLDFINCH more worldly, more committed to ideals outside of the baroque sadness and inward, cringing shame of Theo Decker. But it isn't; THE GOLDFINCH is a long character study of a man falling into his own worst impulses because he believes he merits no better.

For all that commenters and judges of the ToB keep alluding to some structural flaws in THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES, I haven't seen any explicitly mentioned. Maybe when a novel is a first novel reviewers feel obliged to describe it as undercooked because they have to maintain hope that there are greater surprises awaiting them in the second novel. I just don't see it; THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES read as finely as any nth novel I've encountered, and I couldn't tell you a structural flaw. I enjoyed the biographical footnotes, I enjoyed the framing device that we are reading Norton Perina's memoirs, I enjoyed the anthropologist who disappears into the forest and is never seen again, and the feral children populating Perina's mansion of horrors. This novel is about the struggles of one man, but it reaches out again and again to bring in worldly themes. The destruction of paradises. The ills of globalization. Man's colonizing impulse over man. Our fear of our own mortality and infirmity. Society's obsession with the rites of puberty. The treatment of women in science. The treatment of young people in science. The treatment of human and animal subjects in science. I've tread these lines of argument before, but I want to stress that there's something for almost everyone in THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES--maybe nothing for someone who deeply identifies with Ruth Ozeki, but almost everyone.

One aspect of the commentary in the Tournament with regard to THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES that I take issue with is the idea that the memoirs don't read as though they could be written by a scientist, or that Perina's disregard for ethics committees makes him an idiot and not recognizably a scientist. I completely disagree on both fronts, having spend the last five years around many scientists. I believe that scientists can be adept at writing and observing, and also that they can be entirely uncaring about the welfare of their research subjects. I've seen both. And it could be that my personal experiences bias me toward loving a novel that "exposes" the dark side of the worship of scientists, but…

My winner and ToB's: THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES

Read the official tournament judgment here.

Tournament of Books Round Eleven: THE SON by Philipp Meyer vs. ELEANOR & PARK by Rainbow Rowell

Once again I scrolled right to the bottom of today's review, and was relieved to find that the righteous winner of all tournament rounds has triumphed! I really, really liked this book, you guys.

It's difficult to even compare these two novels because of the disparities in genre; even though both focus on teenagers, and to a certain extent on interracial teenage love (at least in the case of Eli and Hates Work, the Comanche girl he kind of has a relationship with) but while ELEANOR & PARK is basically a romantic comedy, THE SON is pure epic. There are parts of THE SON that are funny, as I discussed in the last review, and parts of ELEANOR & PARK that are dark and tragic, but it's hard to even imagine J.A. McCullough reading E&P or Eleanor reading THE SON.

I want to talk briefly about the dark parts of ELEANOR & PARK, and whether the choice to make the stepfather's ultimate transgression writing dirty comments on Eleanor's textbooks was the right choice. Kicking Eleanor out of the house would have been unforgivable to a reasonable parent; destroying her things and the threat of physical violence against her mother certainly should have been enough to spur Eleanor to leave. I guess I just didn't find it realistic that her stepfather would have been the one writing insults on her textbooks. He barely seems to pay attention to her, much less to her textbooks, and it does seem like he was comfortable being confrontational and directly antagonistic toward Eleanor; why would he have to result to writing on her textbooks, and in such a way that it seemed like he was trying to hide it? He didn't try to hide anything else he did to her. I feel like Rowell wanted to go someplace darker, but felt that for the sake of genre or the likability of her story, she had to stick with the crime of being threatening rather than violent.

That shying away from reality for the sake of sparing the reader is something the ToB judge identifies in a different context: the fact that E&P's relationship is chaste until the very end of their time together seems unrealistic to him, having been a teenage boy, and pretty unrealistic to me as well. I certainly knew other teenagers, when I was a teenager, who had relationships every bit as G-rated as Eleanor and Park's...but they were also religious, which E&P are not, and in the absence of an explanatory force like overwhelming moral obligations, I also find it unrealistic that they wouldn't have at least discussed their abstinence.

You know who doesn't flinch from sharing any detail or scene to spare the reader? Philipp Meyer, that's who. And it's partially because these books are pitched at different readers; there are some teenagers to whom I wouldn't recommend THE SON, and some of my relatives who might not enjoy it, and some serious types who I don't think would find E&P captivating. On the whole, though, I think there are more readers who would appreciate THE SON than E&P; THE SON has so many different types of characters, and different story lines, and a broader historical reach. E&P is a vignette. THE SON is an entire collected works.

My winner, and ToB's: THE SON

Read the official Tournament judgment here.

Tournament of Books Round Ten: THE GOOD LORD BIRD by James McBride vs. THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS by Elizabeth Gilbert

It’s interesting that these two books about abolitionists—white abolitionists driven by religious motives, denying themselves earthly luxuries for the sake of their convictions—are narrated by characters who support the abolitionists, more or less, but are leagues more self-centered and more interested in self-preservation (and self-love in one case) than in political and social causes. In THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS, Alma respects her sister’s belief, the way her sister denies herself things like lace, a large house, good food, that Alma herself would never think to give up for the sake of others. And yet Alma doesn’t seem to give slavery more than ten minutes of thought in the entire novel. Her concern with her sister’s cause is whether it will put her in danger from people who don’t agree with her practices of educating and raising black and white children together. She doesn’t really think about whether, morally or philosophically or rationally, what her sister is doing is right. She just wants to know that she won’t be in danger.

And really, Onion feels much the same. He doesn’t want to be put in danger, and stays with John Brown mostly for expediency and for lack of better options; away from John Brown he could easily be thrown back into slavery, and at least with him he has the promise of excitement. He feels deep down that slavery is wrong, but he also mentions twice that he never went hungry as a slave, and didn’t give much thought to his own bondage before John Brown violently removed him from it. He gives a lot of thought to the social structure of black people in his society—the mulatto prostitute, the muscle-bound yard enforcer, the free black people in the North who support them or forget their cause, the noble rebellion-leaders who die for the freedom they can never have—and this makes him more worthy a protagonist than Alma, who gives a lot of thought to moss societies but doesn’t seem too concerned with the society of Tahitians she encounters. How have the Tahitians accepted Christianity and the presence of missionaries within their society full-time? What does it mean that the Tahitians don’t have a strong concept of personal property? How do they treat animals? What is the role of children in this society, who never work but also seem to be some of the most resourceful? All of these issues are touched upon by description of events but never explored intellectually by Alma. Alma observes, and records, and learns to operate within this society with some effort, but doesn’t consider what it means that this society exists in the same world as her own, with its very different strictures and mores. And right when the Tahitians seem about to accept her, drawing her into their rugby game and roughhousing with her as they would one of their own, she has a personal epiphany and leaves, without giving another thought to the people she leaves behind. I touched on this in my last review, but I really don’t think that Elizabeth Gilbert thought about the inner lives and motivations and desires of the Tahitians she describes. I’m sure she did a lot of research, but the only Tahitian who comes alive off the page is Tomorrow Morning. And I think that’s a flaw in an author, using this island interlude to advance the development of only one character. Compare it to the deeply enlivened Ivu’ivu in THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES. Good lord.

I agree with the judge, here. My winner: THE GOOD LORD BIRD.

Read the official Tournament judgment here. 

Tournament of Books Round Nine: HILL WILLIAM by Scott McClanahan vs. A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING by Ruth Ozeki

I had almost forgotten about HILL WILLIAM. Animal cruelty, child abuse, homophobic attacks, and environmental destruction. Didn’t deserve to make it this far, luckily got knocked out in this round, good riddance.

What’s interesting to me about A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING this week is narrator-Ruth’s relationship with her husband, Oliver. Oliver is a little-known artist who works in the medium of plants—he is building an Eocene-era botanical garden on their island home, and believes his work will not be fully appreciated until he has been long dead and the plants have come to be a natural part of the landscape. It’s a nice idea. Ruth also describes Oliver as being a little bit obtuse, and probably having something like Aspberger’s. He can be very sensitive, and sometimes annoys Ruth, but of course she also depends on him and loves him. And the parallel I want to draw here is between Ruth and Hannah Horvath, on GIRLS.

Before you click close tab, if you haven’t seen the most recent episodes of GIRLS, Hannah and her boyfriend Adam are at the hospital visiting Hannah’s dying grandmother. At Hannah’s mother’s suggestion, Adam tells Hannah’s grandmother that he and Hannah are getting married—although they aren’t—because Hannah’s mother believes the grandmother can die happy knowing that her granddaughter is in a stable relationship. When the grandmother’s prognosis improves later, Hannah jokes to her mother about whether she and Adam will have to get married if her grandmother survives. Hannah’s mother tells her to “keep the job, not the guy” and explains that Adam is socially awkward and maybe not a good fit for Hannah; she doesn’t want Hannah to have to “socialize” Adam if they stay together. Of course, Hannah herself can be very socially awkward, and she rightly tells her mother that she doesn’t know enough about Adam to make these statements. We can tell that the judgment hurts, though. Although it’s not sensitively delivered, there’s some truth to it—saddling herself with a man who will sometimes embarrass her is a weighty choice. Their different personalities are charming now, but the charm may not last. And I wonder too whether for Ruth the charm is wearing off; she daily regrets living on their small Canadian island, and intimates that she left New York partly because Oliver loved living on the island. It makes sense that Oliver would; on the island they are part of a small community, while New York could be daunting even for a socially adjusted man. In Ruth’s case, removing Oliver from the unwanted stimuli of New York meant exiling herself; in Hannah’s case, she herself is the unwanted stimulus, and when Adam finds her dramatic personality distracting to his nascent acting career, he moves out of their shared apartment while rehearsing for his play, which is obviously traumatic for Hannah.

The simple question is, is the man worth the trouble, but of course the answer isn’t so easy for Ruth and Hannah—both desperately want to care for their partners while also resenting them for the constraints they impose on their joint lives. Naoko’s story takes this dynamic to the extreme, with a father who retreats from society and from life so completely that she and her mother are forced to change their family structure and protect Naoko’s father from himself. Naoko allows herself to resent her father for losing his job, for taking them from Sunnyvale, for becoming a shut-in and not caring enough about her and her mother to sacrifice his comfort and philosophical ideals to provide for them. But how does Naoko's mother feel, having chosen to marry a sensitive man—a man who might have needed some socializing, as evidenced by his naivete about human consciences and motivations, as well as his habit of interrupting professors unannounced to explore theories of mind—who, it turns out, did not rise to the challenge of being her partner? Will Hannah make the same realization, if Adam's Broadway career falters? 

This round's tangential Winner: A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING

Read the official tournament review here. 

Tournament of Books Round Eight: THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES by Hanya Yanagihara vs. LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson

I almost didn’t read THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read a book about an innocent native people despoiled by the predations of scientific research—I’m usually pretty pro-science, to put it lightly, and I didn’t think a novel about the Ivu’ivu and their cultural traditions would treat science as reverentially as it deserves. I was entirely wrong. First, I was wrong about whether I would be sucked into the novel—I was, deeply and immediately—and I was wrong about how Hanya Yanagihara would treat science. I suspect that Hanya intimately knows her way around the bench, although her author biography doesn’t mention it; the details of the day-to-day efforts of scientific research were accurate (and lovingly, if frustratedly) rendered, and the overall boredom, despair, sudden excitement, backstabbing, self-doubt, deceit, and unworthy-hero-worship of science that for me it took an entire PhD to discover were adeptly sketched. Moreover, although both the narrator and his biographer (and co-conspirator) are characters I despised and partially recognized in scientists I have known, I was enthralled by their story.

The lush jungle of Ivu’ivu is so delicately and wondrously described that I cannot believe its mosses and plants and sickeningly maggot-ridden fruit don’t actually exist in nature. (I want to pause to point out that something as obviously symbolic as a fruit the color and texture of human flesh that is eaten only after it has already been infested with maggots was still both believable as a real object in this world, and captivating to hear about in detail). The opa’ivu’eke was heart-breaking (it is a shy, friendly turtle who the Ivu’ivu eat for a ceremony, and who is later hunted to extinction.) The passages in which Perina returns to the island to reconcile himself to the passage of time, the wreckage wrought by the depredations of pharmaceutical companies, and the subsequent obesity and dependency of the people he had once seen as so mysterious and noble are sensitively written but quite affecting—we know there are cultures undergoing this transformation right now, and many more who have undergone it within the last fifty years. The story touches on the treatment of human and animal subjects in research, how we treat our elders and the disease of dementia, what defines the boundary between childhood and adulthood, at what point a good deed becomes overdone and then becomes an evil deed, and how we as a society reward—or even regard—someone who has done something wonderful and meritorious and also something terrible and illegal. This story comes up again and again—Woody Allen, Roman Polanski—and we don’t know how to answer it. We want to divorce the work from the crimes, the art from the allegations, but of course we can’t. We want to have a way to easily classify these men as good or bad, but we inevitably brush under the rug one side or the other of themselves. Even Perina’s team does this, when they first refuse to believe the ritual Perina has witnessed, and then decide not to write about it in Western journals. Perhaps by not bearing witness, they believe they can erase the act from record.

Ursula, on the other hand, in her life after life, bears witness to too much, without having done much on her own. Ursula is frequently the victim, and sometimes sins by omission—such as when she ends up married to a Nazi and does nothing, even as her sister back in England has been warning her of the dangers of the Reich—but in none of her many lives does she commit a heroic act, or a dastardly one. Even when faced with a brutally abusive husband, Ursula doesn’t murder him. Ursula never sets a bomb, or sells secrets, or shows much of a character flaw beyond some adultery. Ursula serves as a stand-in for the reader, a transparent looking-glass through which we can see much of the twentieth century as it unfolds in Europe—and through which we can brush up against death, and feel its cold fingers on the other side of the pane—but she doesn’t come alive for me as a character the way Norton Perina does. She doesn’t make me want to spend more time with her psyche, because her psyche exists solely for me to project my own onto it, and observe the Blitz and the flu epidemic almost first hand. Again, my winner:

THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES.

Luckily the ToB agrees with me, and WOKE UP LONELY is even leading the Zombie round! Read the official verdict by Judge John Green here. 

Tournament of Books Round Seven: LONG DIVISION by Kiese Laymon vs. THE GOLDFINCH by Donna Tartt

"You're so long division," Shalaya Crump tells City. By which she means he "shows his work," he's process-driven and detailed. I would say that City is more homotopic (and not because of his feelings for LaVander Peeler); he splits into two journeys once he finds Long Division the novel-within-this-novel, takes two separate but fairly continuous paths, and winds up back as one boy in the present. The time travel allows City to explore different versions of himself: one where he is notorious for causing a scene at a "sentence bee", and one where he isn't; one where he has a girlfriend, and one where he has vague feelings for another boy; one where he is brave and one where he is less so; one where he is religious and one where he is just scared. City's struggle with the performance of identity is familiar and timeless; he wants to be tough but he is probably the school nerd, he wants to be considered mysterious and attractive but he is chubby and very concerned with what others think of him, he wants to be a YouTube celebrity but he doesn't want to parlay his moment of fame into a reality show appearance. He struggles with the idea that the types of culture presented in a high school english class are not "for" him or people like him, while believing that the rap lyrics written by his friend would never be accepted as a literary text. He is deeply affronted by a group of racists who kick him into the mud, but doesn't understand that in the 1940s a Jewish man would also be a target of the KKK.

City gets co-opted into the adventures of a lot of women around him, including his grandmother, Shalaya Crump, and Baize Shepard. I think I would have liked this novel a lot more if it were told from the perspective of one of them; a lot of the time City didn't understand what was going on or why, and neither did I. I also found it difficult to fall into a rhythm with the novel's dialect; either I wasn't cool enough to understand it or I just got really sick of every beverage being referred to as "drank." It's one thing to have an authentically rendered African-American dialogue (like, I don't know, THE GOOD LORD BIRD?) and another to sound like the narrator is Lil Jon.

From one coming-of-age story to another, I was probably better poised to like THE GOLDFINCH from the beginning, because Theo Decker is cultured and white and a little bit of an asshole, and so am I. Other reviews have pointed out a glaring hole in the novel that actually didn't even occur to me when I was reading it; the bomb that kills Theo's mother and leads him to steal the goldfinch painting was a pretty significant terrorist attack that doesn't seem to have many repercussions on life in New York or Theo's perception of his geopolitical reality. Regardless, Theo has more than enough to worry about. I was particularly sympathetic to his fascination with the painting, as I had seen that very painting about a year earlier at the DeYoung museum in San Francisco, in an exhibit of Dutch treasures from the Mauritius museum. I was just as taken with it as Theo was, even though it wasn't the centerpiece of the exhibition; the bird just pops, looks both realistic and impressionistic, and the painting itself is very different from what you'd normally expect of a Dutch Master. It's on a light background, the composition is very simple, and the subject seems to glow from within, rather than from a carefully considered out-of-frame light source. Is it great enough that I would take it from the wall of a bombed-out museum? Sure, maybe. Theo's action doesn't seem so bad; he's trying to protect the painting because he doesn't know if there are more bombs waiting to go off in the building. Even keeping it for a week, a month, a year, I still believe that if he had gone to turn it in he wouldn't have been in trouble; he was a kid, and a victim of a terrorist attack, and he was understandably shaken and confused.

However, for the plot to hold together, we kind of have to believe that Theo would have gone to jail for turning it in, and soon enough he will because of the various criminal elements who try to blackmail him. There are some convoluted twists and turns surrounding the ownership and importance of the painting, and the genre of the novel veers from Harry Potter-like (the part where Theo gets adopted by the kindly furniture restorer and begins his odd apprenticeship) to Mad Max (Theo and his Russian pal in a deserted exurb, doing drugs and getting beat up and escaping from Theo's dad and the loan sharks who want to kill him) to Great Gatsby (Theo getting betrothed to a girl who is Daisy Buchanan in better shoes, escaping the engagement due to her infidelity with a childhood sweetheart, drinking too much, and going to too many parties). I think the book is ambitious, and I applaud it for that. Theo's struggle to keep from turning into his father is emotionally affecting, even as the reader understands that Theo is bringing all of his troubles on himself, and the happy ending he finally finds seems like the best-case scenario for all involved. Theo does not, after all, drag an otherworldly and innocent woman into his downfall as his father did (and as he very much wants to); he doesn't alienate all of his friends and blind himself from his failures (as his father did and as we are afraid he will by the last third of the book), and he doesn't ruin something beautiful--something that it turns out he never had the ability to ruin in the first place, though he thought for so long that he did.

Round winner: THE GOLDFINCH

Read the official ToB tournament round here.

Tournament of Books Round Six: THE SON by Philipp Meyer vs. AT NIGHT WE WALK IN CIRCLES by Daniel Alarcon

This morning I scrolled to the end of the ToB judgment with my heart in my throat because I love THE SON so, so much. Luckily, it survived, and as you know from my post about the pre-bracket round, I want THE SON to go all the way. So let’s get administrative details out of the way first:

Round winner: THE SON

Really excellent runner-up, though: AT NIGHT WE WALK IN CIRCLES

I liked both of these books quite a bit (my top 4 in the tournament are THE SON, WOKE UP LONELY, THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES, and AT NIGHT WE WALK IN CIRCLES, in that order). I first heard of the Alarcon from my dad, who must have heard about it on NPR. When he and I talked about it, he was halfway through and didn’t like it, but he doesn’t read much fiction. I don’t read much Latin American fiction (though I should!) so perhaps I liked this novel even more than someone familiar with the history of Peru would have. The plot is strongly driven by motion and by events—Nelson’s travels with the theatre troupe Diciembre, the staging and rehearsals and production of The Idiot President in far-flung markets and schoolrooms, and Nelson’s subsequent captivity, at Rogelio’s house, by Ixta’s pregnancy and remoteness, and then later in Collectors. The tension continually escalates, partially because of the device of the unknown narrator—we understand that Nelson is unavailable, and possibly dead, but don’t know how, or who else might be involved. This was a novel in which I felt progressively more afraid for each of the characters; every decision and every missed opportunity, starting with Nelson’s failed attempt to get a US visa, seemed like a tightening of the noose.

Having been on a theatre tour of small and non-standard venues in England, performing a German absurdist play, I also felt strongly connected to Nelson, and to the itinerant actor’s struggles to stay involved in life at home while giving oneself over to the world of the play and the acting troupe.

Alarcon has also done a lot of research on the real-life prison communities that Collectors is based on, and the horrors he exposes in his nonfiction articles for the New Yorker deeply informed the events and descriptions in ANWWIC, making Nelson’s story real and urgent. It wasn’t a novel I would recommend to everyone without restraint, like THE SON, but I think a fan of Calvino or Saramago would enjoy it.

THE SON, though. Oh my god. This multi-narrated epic of the settling of the Texas frontier, of oil and Comanches and Mexicans and changing mores and means of employment. I have to say that when I started reading this book it came as a shock that Native Americans were ruthlessly violent. I mean…they were, certainly, but hipster revisionist history holds that they were and are only the victims of white oppressors, which of course is not the fully story. I, too, liked the Colonel’s parts (Eli McCullough’s) the most—who wouldn’t? His story is harrowing and adventurous and emotional, and he’s a humorous narrator. I didn’t realize it until relatively late in the book when, describing a German woman who was held captive by the Comanches and lied about her treatment to retain her social status, he mocks her story “She still had it, thanks to me, honor honor honor, that was all.” Until then, his story is darkly funny in parts, but we aren’t sure whether he knows it as a narrator (vs. the author ensuring it). But he DOES, and this made me love him all the more. Peter McCullough and J.A. McCullough are delightful in their own ways. J.A. delivers perceptive and biting insights into relationships, feminism, business acumen, and aging. Peter’s story is dark but redemptive, and when he finally stands up for himself and chases after what he wants, I was ecstatic. I want to see the movie of THE SON just to see Peter’s confrontation with his estranged wife. Well, and also to see the Comanche camp. And the hunting retreat where J.A. confronts being the only woman in an old boys’ club. I can’t even write coherently about this book yet because I loved it so much, but I’ll get another chance to write about it next week, and I’m so glad.    

Read the delightful official ToB review here. 

Tournament of Books Round Five: THE LOWLAND by Jhumpa Lahiri vs. ELEANOR & PARK by Rainbow Rowell

When I told a friend I was reading THE LOWLAND by Jhumpa Lahiri, she nodded with recognition and told me, “I loved THE INTERPRETER OF MALADIES.” And I thought about it, but I didn’t correct her because I wasn’t entirely sure. So I have that mark against me: I can’t always tell apart our modern Indian female novelists.

When I picked up ELEANOR & PARK it took me a couple of days to realize that the author is named after a sushi favorite. I don’t think this affected my enjoyment of the book. I love sushi.

Both of these novels deal with the significance of small intimacies and sweeping acts of love. Eleanor and Park are at that age where falling in love is immersive, cataclysmically important, and confusingly pixelated into individual moments of connection: liking the same song, holding hands on the bus, sharing earbuds. The novel’s descriptions of how these moments feel were resonant and delicate, and the overarching plot almost didn’t matter—Eleanor has an evil stepfather, a host of pesky younger siblings, and a downtrodden, ineffective mother. Park’s father is ex-military and wishes his son were more macho; his mom a Korean immigrant who runs a beauty salon out of their garage and supports Park’s experimentation with eyeliner. It’s not that these characters were stereotypes, but their importance to the story was obviously secondary to the importance of Eleanor and Park’s budding relationship, and nascent self-confidence driven by reliance on one another. There are three models of co-dependency in the relationships in this book, and like Goldilocks, one is too little, one is not enough, and one is just right. I’m glad that young adults are reading this book, because Park and Eleanor’s relationship is healthy and kind, supportive and daring and charming and funny. Like THE FAULT IN OUR STARS of last year’s ToB, this is a teen couple that makes me like teen couples, and it was a pleasure to read.

THE LOWLAND is so, so beautifully written. Reading it felt like sinking into a nostalgic memory, and following these characters’ lives from young childhood to old age gave a rich, and very real, sense of their lives. The sensory descriptions of neighborhoods—a swampland-adjacent cul-de-sac in India, seaside Providence, Rhode Island, and a co-op in Brooklyn—were each so lovingly and particularly described that they took on the grandeur of Paris or Bora Bora.

This loving care paid to places and objects (books, furniture, food, paintings) is parceled out more parsimoniously to characters. These characters desert each other at pivotal moments—Udayan by not warning his young bride of the danger that he is in, and the danger he puts her in to further his political gang; Gauri by leaving Subhash, and her daughter, as soon as she has achieved her educational goals. The reader is invited both to understand Gauri and to despise her; she is borne along by a tide of male expectations for her as a wife, a mother, an Indian woman, and a student, and finally seizes the opportunity to remake her life as she wants it to be, even without romance and family, but she also treats her new husband and her daughter in the most painfully dismissive way possible, from the start, even as Subhash is giving her more opportunity than she could have imagined as a young college student. Bela’s confrontation with her mother over Subhash’s divorce papers is realistically harrowing. Gauri’s subsequent despair-fueled visit to India shows even more vividly the ways in which she has defined herself, and her world—in apposition to India, retaining comfort in its culture and her memories, but in a position that India would not permit a woman to be. If ELEANOR & PARK is about co-dependency in relationships, THE LOWLAND is about the internal and external limits to a person’s satisfaction with independence.

My winner: THE LOWLAND

ToB winner: ELEANOR & PARK

Yet again we disagree, Rooster. Next week I’ll get into what I see as the unrealized possibilities of E&P as a novel. Read the official ToB judgment here. 

Tournament of Books Round Four: THE DINNER by Herman Koch vs. THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS by Elizabeth Gilbert

Both of these books fell short of my expectations. THE DINNER went too far into an unrealistic portrait of criminal insanity. THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS was maybe slightly a bit paternalistic and plodding and unremittingly accepting of mediocrity.

Let’s just say that I saw the announcement of an upcoming novel by Herman Koch and I wanted to read it; I have no desire to read EAT, PRAY, LOVE or whatever Elizabeth Gilbert writes next. That said, THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS might be a better book. It’s more ambitious as a story, and probably more successful at taking the reader where Gilbert wants her to go. It’s just that I am more interested in Koch’s promise as an author than in Gilbert’s. I feel like this book was Gilbert giving it her all. I think Koch spent some time with an interesting idea and just didn’t hold himself back at the end from taking it all the way to a slightly illogical conclusion.

Here’s what I mean; I believe that boys like the boys in THE DINNER might find it entertaining to harangue a homeless woman. They might find it funny to set her belongings on fire, and might accidentally set her on fire in the process. They might then be sort of scared and fascinated, and fail to put her out. She might die. They might then both lie about it to their parents and talk about it on social media to their friends. They might threaten their step-brother to keep the secret safe from the police. All this seems plausible. Might they then go so far as to kill the step-brother to avoid jail? Sure, maybe. Might their mother cover for them? Their father? Yes, absolutely. Might their father, Paul, brutally assault his son’s school principal, in his office, in the middle of the day, with witnesses, and get away with it? No, absolutely not.

Then are we supposed to believe that Paul is an unreliable narrator given to flights of fancy, possibly caused by his genetic predisposition toward violence? Well, maybe, but that throws the entire premise of the novel—that these events happened and Paul is relating them faithfully, and we are supposed to be horrified both by the events and by Paul’s equanimity in their telling—into question. If Paul is unreliable, did his sons really commit this crime, or does he just imagine they did because they were out on the same night as the crime occurred and they won’t share their YouTube passwords with him? If Paul is unreliable, is his wife really supporting him in his criminality, or is he imagining she is because it allows him to avoid thinking that the person he cares most about might think he needs to change? Paul can’t be unreliable. So we have to imagine that in this Holland, Paul never attracts police attention. Claire does, for doing basically the same thing that Paul did. I believe everything but this. I believe that Paul would have been arrested for assaulting the principal. It’s a small point to belabor, but it ruined the novel for me—as did the extremely, er, powerful amniocentesis—and I can’t quite get over it.

THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS, on the other hand, is a novel about a woman, Alma, who is very highly qualified to be a scientist, and yet fails to push herself to achieve. Anything, basically. Ever. She chooses a field of study particularly because it is under-studied and no one cares about it. She publishes two books on moss. When her father dies, she realizes that she hasn’t ever left her hometown, and decides to follow her deceased ex-husband to Tahiti. Here is where the novel swerves into an odd ignoble-savages interlude that I’m going to fall slightly short of calling racist. Certainly the only people Alma feels are worthy of talking to are the white pastor, and his adopted Tahitian son who has accepted Western ways and converted to Christianity. Then she independently comes upon the theory of evolution. And writes it up into a pamphlet, and then sits on it. Doesn’t publish it. Gets scooped not only by Darwin but by Alfred Wallace, also. I was just upset throughout this story that Alma had so much promise, and just refused to fulfill it. She refuses to fulfill herself in other ways, too; all she wants her entire life is to sleep with a man, and she just never makes it happen. Do we need to talk about the binding closet? The binding closet is not a fair exchange for a fulfilling relationship with another human being, which Alma never finds. Not that there are a lot of human beings around deserving; Alma is roundly chastised by her nurse (and basically by Gilbert) for ignoring her sister and her sister’s abolitionist family. Well, her sister never spoke to her, is basically a Puritan, and has consigned herself to an unhappy relationship for the sake of pissing off the whites in their town and educating young black children. To be honest, I don’t blame Alma for not being BFFs with Prudence. Prudence never made the effort.

THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS does show a remarkable curiosity about, and admiration for, the natural world. As a scientist, I liked it. I was interested in mosses by the end of it, or at least more interested than I had been from the beginning. I was just disappointed in Alma. And I suppose she might be disappointed in herself, too.

Book winner: THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS

Overall author potential winner: THE DINNER

The ToB and I agree on this one, and we will revisit the binding closet next week.

Read the official Rooster judgment here. 

Tournament of Books Round Three: THE TUNER OF SILENCES by Mia Couto vs. THE GOOD LORD BIRD by James McBride

THE TUNER OF SILENCES had a lot stacked against it from the beginning. It’s the only book in the Tournament in translation (originally in Portuguese); it’s about an African boy in Mozambique, and I read about half of it before realizing that Mia Couto was a man, not a woman, which definitely made the second half of it read differently than the first had. (“How interesting,” I thought, “a book told from the perspective of a boy who has never seen a woman before, written by a woman!” Then, later, “Oh. No, then.”) The premise is a bit confusing, and actually remained confusing for me throughout. The narrator’s mother dies when the narrator is quite young, and the narrator’s father moves himself, the narrator (Mwanito), the narrator’s older brother, an ex-soldier/current manservant, and possibly the boys’ uncle to a very remote game preserve, where they create a little homestead and the narrator’s father leads him to believe that they are the post-apocalyptic last remaining settlers of the world. The boys’ uncle brings them supplies regularly, which presumably he is then getting by plundering the ruined towns still standing, or by trading with whatever diseased and zombiefied locals remain, I’m not sure. In reality, the boys’ father has been driven to madness by his wife’s death (and, prior to her death, her gang rape), and is now both devoutly religious and totally nuts. He has replaced the boys’ mother with a donkey, and refuses to let the boys read or write.

To me, the premise of the book is sad and terrifying, but the plot is driven by the mystery of what actually happened to the boys’ mother Alma, and what a Portuguese woman is doing when she suddenly appears in their camp. The narrator’s survival is not seriously called into question, but the resolutions of the mysteries of these two women occur very late in the story and were, to me at least, unsatisfying. To me, the interesting part of a story about a child raised in deprived conditions is (a) how does the child escape those conditions, and (b) how does the child then adjust to regular life. Mwanito’s escape is kind of a deus ex machina, and his subsequent adjustment to regular life is quite easy, and occurs late in the narrative. The novel seemed less concerned with plot and more concerned with experimentation around language, religiosity, and expressions of sorrow. There are hints of magical realism. Parts of the narrative read like folklore. These aspects did not endear me to the novel, but for a certain reader, they might.

The premise of THE GOOD LORD BIRD, on the other hand, is quite interesting—a first-hand account of John Brown’s abolitionist battle at Harper’s Ferry. Told from the perspective of a slave nicknamed Onion whom John Brown freed, misgendered, and kind of condemned to living as a girl for a couple of years (though, if the introductory chapter is to be believed, Onion continued to dress as a woman for much, much longer). Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman make cameos. Even to a less-than-keen student of American history, this premise is interesting, and the story itself is interesting even when it departs briefly from the story of John Brown. 

There are many anti-heroes in THE GOOD LORD BIRD, not least of which the narrator, Onion, who weathers many a remark that he is only concerned with saving his own skin. The narrative makes the good point that a slave probably has good reason to not have many more pressing concerns than personal survival. I kind of loved the book for that alone—acknowledging that John Brown and Frederick Douglass performed great acts and were very important to American history, while simultaneously acknowledging that a lot of slaves and free blacks weren’t particularly grateful for their actions at the time. It puts more agency into the hands of Onion and the rest of John Brown’s army, and gives the reader an interesting view into what it would mean to be nonviolent during a time when violence was so common, expected, and celebrated. The best reason I found in the story for Onion’s cross-dressing was that his experiences with men, and with manhood, are all of violence, shooting and death and dying. Even a female character, upon being led to the gallows, exhorts her fellow prisoner to “be a man.” John Brown’s son is told to “die like a man,” and he does; others escape the battle unharmed by not fighting, but are thought to be cowardly. Onion’s personal philosophy rejects violence, but he has trouble articulating this philosophy, even to himself, and so falls back on an identity in which he can be brave without being violent.

It’s a nice message. It wasn’t my favorite book of the Tournament, by far, but I liked it well enough. This round’s winner, then: THE GOOD LORD BIRD.

And, this is the first round in which I and the Tournament agree! Read the official ToB judgment here. 

Tournament of Books Round Two: HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA by Mohsin Hamid vs. A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING by Ruth Ozeki

For the first time in the tournament, you are going to be reviewing two books about which you cared relatively little. It wasn't so much the formal experimentation in structure (using second-person narration throughout, or playing fast and loose with quantum mechanics and a self-titled narrator), but more the history of both: you'd read THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST and found it okay, but not even the best novel about Pakistan published at around the same time (A CASE OF EXPLODING MANGOES, anyone?). You'd read Ruth Ozeki's previous work (MY YEAR OF MEATS and ALL OVER CREATION) and found them tediously preachy. Not only do you basically feel that to be anti-GMO (like AOC) is to be anti-science, and to be anti-middle-American-farmer (like MYoM) is to be unbearably pretentious, but the books struck too treacly a tone for you. Their characters felt unreal, the way that the Three Little Bears feel unreal.

You certainly pushed through and read both; HTGFRIRA took maybe two hours, while ATFTTB took much longer, and therefore had more to offer. HTGFRIRA read like the outline for a novel you would have enjoyed reading, probably, maybe more so if the main character had ever taken a real risk. How did he get to be a presumably shrewd businessperson while having no idea how to speak to a woman he's infatuated with? How did he end up in this marriage, with these children, without knowing anything important about his wife? How did his business partner manage to abscond with the funds he had raised to buy another company? Wouldn't that be put in escrow? Aren't there financial safeguards for this kind of thing? Was all that just a smoke and mirror plot device to get the main character finally to a place where he could maybe speak to the woman he likes without having to maintain appearances? These are the types of questions you asked yourself after reading.

The types of questions you had while reading ATFTTB were more like: Does a grown woman talking about a crowded beach actually say "I wonder if there's something else going on. This sucks. We're going to have to park and walk"? Or did the author get confused about which of her narrators was supposed to be the angst-ridden teenager and which the angst-ridden middle-ager? Are these supposed emails with a supposed Stanford psychology professor not the most fake correspondence ever written? Let me quote extensively:

In stilted English, he explained that he was originally from Tokyo and had been headhunted to work on human-computer interface design. He loved his work and had no problem with the computer end of things. His problem, he said, was the human factor. He didn’t understand human beings very well, so he’d come to the Psychology Department at Stanford to ask for help.I was astonished, but curious, too. Silicon Valley is not Tokyo, and it would be natural for him to be suffering from culture shock or having problems relating to his co-workers. “What kind of help do you want?” I asked.He sat with his head bowed, gathering his words. When he looked up, I could see the strain in his face.“I want to know, what is human conscience?”“Human consciousness?” I asked, not hearing him correctly.“No,” he said. “Con-sci-ence. When I search for this word in the English dictionary, I find that it is from Latin. Con means ‘with,’ and science means ‘knowing.’ So conscience means ‘with knowing.’ With science.”“I’ve never quite thought about it that way,” I told him. “But I’m sure you’re right.”

Oh dear Lord, you think. Spare me the Linguistics 101 crap and get to the point, no computer engineer would ever think that the best way to solve a problem is to go to the nearest university, find any professor basically at random, knock on their door, and expect they're going to engage with you on a problem of semantics. Apparently the literary world is long overdue for a novel about the realities of academia if this is the common impression of professors.

There were spots in ATFTTB that were interesting and wicked; the suicide grove/park, Naoko's torture of her classmate to get the information she needs, the idea that an entire classroom would decide to not only deny the existence of a fellow student but to hold a funeral for that student in her presence and film it and put it on YouTube. But there were parts that just felt sloppy and rushed (and you are really glad the cat didn't die, because you honestly would have had to put the book down if the cat had died.)

Here's how it seemed to you in the end: the Ruth-narrator and the Ruth-author both seem pretty open that this novel was written after having spent a long time with Ruth's mother, who had Alzheimer's and passed away. The mother, at least for Ruth-narrator, remained somewhat inscrutable; she made friends with the guy who managed the dump, enjoyed going to the "free store", seemed to reinforce some of Ruth's husband's annoying habits, and never came through as the font of maternal sagacity that Ruth obviously expected from a Female Elder, from someone to whom one was Paying Respect. Naoko's tale, then, is more wish fulfillment (see also, LIFE AFTER LIFE). Naoko's great-grandmother is not only a koan-spouting Yoda of an old lady, she's also a Buddhist nun, something of a feminist counter-culturalist, and imparts a shit-ton of cryptic wisdom and family history to Naoko before she dies. To you, at least, it is fairly obvious that this is what Ruth wishes caring for her mother had been like. That her mother had taken the time to count the moments, smell the roses, whatever, rather than being enchanted by a good deal at the dump. That she had continued to care for the world outside her in a religious and self-sacrificing way, rather than forgetting to watch the news and being more interested in the wilderness of a small, cold island. That she had saved the day and brought the family closer together while simultaneously exposing family secrets and WWII intrigue. And these wishes kind of cement your feelings about sanctimoniousness in general: that behind these self-righteous postures is just an unwillingness to engage with the world the way it actually is. An unwillingness to accept that "issues" like genetically modified foods can be manufactured controversy, and that eating American beef is not 100% bad and slovenly 100% of the time. Laziness in the same sense that explaining away the lack of an ending to Naoko's story with some poorly-explained dross about Schrodinger's Cat (again? Again? This comes up so many goddamn times in literature, try reading more than one popular science book to get a physics example to use that is not goddamn Schrodinger's Cat) is lazy.

Your winner, then, is HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA, not because it was particularly great, but because you really didn't like A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING.

Of course, this being the Tournament of Books, you are now 0 for 3, and the ToB round winner is A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING. Further exposition on its faults next week.

Read the Tournament decision here.

Tournament of Books Round One - HILL WILLIAM by Scott McClanahan vs. THE LUMINARIES by Eleanor Catton

At the previous round, on Monday, I had not yet started THE LUMINARIES. I read HILL WILLIAM a week prior; I ordered it from Amazon and finished it in about an hour and a half. I had three days to read THE LUMINARIES, and I managed it, but just barely--as you can see by the lateness of this post. I think it speaks highly of THE LUMINARIES that it held my attention and continuously entreated me to keep reading it, these past three days--it's a remarkably well-wrought story, with an intriguing, vast, complex plot. In some ways, it's a mystery, with a man who has disappeared, fortunes that have been stolen, a man who has died under suspicious circumstances, illegitimate children, ladies of the night, and opium dens. It's a very interesting piece of historical fiction about an era and circumstances which I had literally never before considered, the gold rush in New Zealand. It contains some elements of the supernatural; Anna and Emery are in a sense in spiritual possession of each other's bodies, a fact made most evident by Anna's sudden acquisition of literacy, a scene that gave me actual goosebumps.

It's an incredibly cinematic novel--each scene is self-contained, and the fadings in and out between characters' perspectives have the steady ebb and flow and persistence of a tide of narrative. There is a character for every temperament to champion, and excellent intertwined parables of crime and punishment, the distinction between honesty and loyalty, morality and respectability, artifice and artlessness, addiction and abstention.

HILL WILLIAM, by contrast, has a small cast of small-minded characters who behave inscrutably and abominably. It seems as though McClanahan writes his characters solely to provoke. Their motivations are insensible and their insights as simplistic as the example given in the ToB judgment--the hills are either graves or pregnant bellies? The hills, in McClanahan's Appalachia, are being razed for profit, and a dead infant is being mourned as though it were still alive in the hospital. Neither graves nor babies seem to hold much reverence for the narrator. I don't mean to disparage "shock fiction", to purloin a term--I love Chuck Palahniuk, I love Ryu Murakami, I love Irvine Welsh. McClanahan's shock just seems lazy, in a way. There's something darkly funny about his homophobic characters' actions, and something just inarticulate about the vague intimations of sexual abuse suffered by many.

There is nothing at all inarticulate about any of Eleanor Catton's characters, even those for whom English is not quite a mastered skill. I would read THE LUMINARIES again, all its hundreds of pages. I already can't bother to give HILL WILLIAM a second thought.

My winner: THE LUMINARIES.
ToB round winner: HILL WILLIAM. Maybe I will have to look it over again.

I'm zero for two, guys. Holding out hope for the Zombie round.

Read the ToB round judgment here.

ToB Pre-Bracket Round: LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson vs. WOKE UP LONELY by Fiona Maazel

I love The Morning News, and I love the Tournament of Books, so shortly after the longlist was announced, I decided I would read all the books in the tournament and write my own bracket commentary. This was around new year’s.

Then I read “Tampa” so I was already off to a rocky start when the shortlist was announced. My books were not provided by Powell’s, but I did secure some of them from a lovely website with very decently priced e-books, which I can share with interested parties. As of this writing, I am still reading The Luminaries and The Good Lord Bird. But I’m going to get it done. And rather than beat around the bush, I’m going to tell you now: If I had to choose a winner of the entire tournament, I would pick The Son.

But that commentary comes later, and for now:

ToB Pre-Bracket Round: LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson vs. WOKE UP LONELY by Fiona Maazel

I’m a scientist, so I need to state my conflicts of interest before I can write my paper: Fiona Maazel is one of my favorite authors. I came into this round with a strong bias, and I still believe it shouldn’t have been the pre-bracket round—Maazel and Atkinson both deserve a fully vested bracket—but I really, really love Fiona Maazel. When I heard there was a release date for WOKE UP LONELY, I requested from my facebook friends (the personal ether) an advanced review copy for Christmas. Turns out no one I know is in with Graywolf Press, but this was a book I bought on the day it was released, and gladly. I read the first half of it twice, because I didn’t want it to be over too soon. Then I read the entire thing on a plane ride (one of the reasons I have the luxury of reading all of the ToB books is that my job puts me on an airplane for five hours a week) and I loved it. Maazel has a similar writing temperament to Amy Hempel—short, almost sarcastically witty turns of phrase, directness that conceals a great deal of artistry, and characters with unexplored depths and side plots shooting off of them like auras. WOKE UP LONELY involves a social networking cult, North Korea, chemical control of the weather, a woman who runs her own two-person CIA, and an underground economy of spas, sex clubs, and MMA fights. And each of these is a sideline to the primary story, which is about love within a family, a story told through the central couple, Thurlow Dan and Esme Haas (great names? Great names) as well as through the four operatives Esme enlists to infiltrate Dan’s mansion. Esme and Dan came together under inauspicious circumstances, and they keep coming together over and over again—when one is impersonating Kim Jong Il, when one is carrying a baby as cover for a spying operation, when one is running from the law and the only place they can be together as a family is in a radio dish in the forest—and these reunions carry less anguish than anticipation. Maazel has explored these themes before; LAST LAST CHANCE, her previous novel, also shows families breaking apart and coming together again under apocalyptic conditions. It’s a type of wish fulfillment—even under the worst conditions for life, those who are meant to be together will be together—and it also relieves the reader from the pressure of worrying that something terrible will actually happen (it will and it won’t), which brings me to LIFE AFTER LIFE.

Do I have a history with Kate Atkinson? Not particularly. I’ve read a few of her novels (WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS and STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG come to mind) and enjoyed them. I had heard a lot about LIFE AFTER LIFE before even beginning this project, and it lived up to the hype—allowing Ursula Todd to meet untimely end after untimely end and then resurrecting her to live a slightly different life each time is a novel and amusing trope that could have continued on for twice as long and remained entertaining. Ursula gets to best a rapist, a child murderer, and an abusive husband, and then she kills Hitler—wish fulfillment at its finest. A skillfully drawn cast of supporting characters, primarily family, add to her sometimes flat characterization. I still feel that I know much more about her aunt Izzie’s internal life than I do hers, for example, even as we are shown her painstaking bouts of psychoanalysis attempting to make sense of her vague understanding of her past lives. Perhaps it was intentional, but I didn’t feel that Ursula was very quick-witted; she is never excited about her perhaps mystical powers, only vaguely trepidatious. She has some of the right political feelings and some of the wrong ones—she befriends Eva Braun in a few lives, and sometimes fails to see the evil in Germany until it is too late—but for all the tedious episodes in London mid-Blitz, the primary impression I had of her character was that she is tired. Tired of being alone, tired of living through the war, tired of not understanding her memories of other times, places, and people, and tired of feeling the need to save others from fates she doesn’t quite understand. It’s a very realistic reaction, but not one that made for an exciting read. Whereas I want to spend more time with every one of WOKE UP LONELY’s characters (and to read Thurlow Dan’s writings for the Helix), I’m not interested in fleshing out a particular instance of Ursula Todd’s life. I have the true crime aficionado’s affection for seeing all the various ways she expires, but, as is quite possibly Atkinson’s intention, the expiry date is never mourned.

My winner is WOKE UP LONELY.

Unfortunately for me, the TOB continues on with LIFE AFTER LIFE, so I’ll be writing more on it next week or so.

Read the Tournament round here.